The Poem is quite apt i must say about what happened yesterday night and my subsequent reactions. It was more like a series of stupid decisions and fortunate events. At almost every point i took a wrong turn and at every wrong turn i took, i was lucky and found the correct directions .... fortune does favour the brave even if the brave are incomprehensibly stupid !!
It had been snowing hard for two days, and though i didnt know it at that time it was the most snowfall received by that region in a few years, when i started out on my journey from a small town called MiddleTown to go to New Jersey. To tell you the truth, i was rather against the idea of starting out that evening. And the snow was only half the reason. And since it was just half the reason i made doubly sure that i should go. That was the first mistake. I was taking a ride till the station with a friend. We did lose our way to the station but when you are in a car, you tend to feel safe. And ironically I felt rather afraid not when we lost the way but when we actually found the station. The station was closed and deserted except for a group of people chatting there. I had almost and hour before the train and since the station was closed i was stuck outside in the snow. The saving grace of course were the people and I took heart from that group thinking that they were also waiting for the same train. But i was quite wrong. They were waiting for a cab which came along, soon enough. That left me with another person who was waiting for his taxi to come along. He didnt seem quite as fortunate as the other people who had just left.
His cab didnt arrive almost till i left which was around an hour after. I am not one to strike up a conversation, but here i found myself talking to him. And it was from him that i realised that things could go really wrong. He had arrived on a train which was running 5 hours late, he said ! Here was when i made the first phone call to Mukta and asked her to get me info about the schedules. But she was out and would only reach office after 10 mins. I decided to wait till
she called back, but my patience soon ran out and after waiting for some time, i went into a frenzy calling up people to look this up. But as luck would have it, no one was at their phones. It was also at this point that i realised that i was low on battery. Conversation and song
are two things , i had realised a long time back, that easily and unfailingly lift the heart. But on that night, i didnt have either luxury. But everyone did call back and almost at the same time too. So for the first time i required the phone to actually have three levels of call waiting ... which apparently it does not support.
In any case i found that the train from Meriden to New Haven to NY was on time but that some trains from NY to NJ were cancelled. And this info i got at the moment when the train i thought was entering the station. This was not my train, but the next one which arrived barely
a minute later was. Here is where i made the second wrong decision. I should have headed back, and i desperately wanted to head back, but i ploughed on. The thought was the there was another train back in 40 minutes if things really were wrong in NY. But once on that train
there was no turning back. On the train i found i didnt have enough money for a ticket to NY so
bought one till New Haven. And my plans of withdrawin money from the ATM on the station and getting back on the train were very much shattered, since the train was running late, it just shortened the halt at New Haven and i saw it chugging out of the station just as i located
the ATM on the station. Here i felt totally mad at myself since the train back which was supposed to run 45 min later was scheduled to be 3 hours late. So i was stuck for a long time. But as luck had it there was a train which Mukta had missed when she looked up the schedule.
The next MTA train was to grand central and it left at 9:55 and thats what i took. And in the train i followed your example. I went to sleep , lying on the seat with my feet hanging down :-) It was as well that i did for the night was to be longer than i had anticipated. The plan
was to reach Grand Central at 11:30 , walk down to Penn Station before 12 and take that train and be home by 1:30. A decent time after all.
By this time i had pestered Sagar into looking up the train numbers on the NJ Transit website and matching them with the schedule numbers and getting to know exactly which trains had been cancelled. And the 12:00 train was not on that list. And after this i switched off my phone and went to sleep. So far so good.
I kept getting up intermittently at stations but I finally woke up when we were at Harlem. The station and the area outside it looked beautiful. The fresh snow bathing in neons was a sight i had not seen.
And it was beautiful. That and the lanes and the houses. Supposedly Harlem one of the worst areas in the country. I cant quite reconcile the image i saw there with whats supposed to be the truth. And i pushed myself out of sleep as we entered Grand Central. Since my cell phone was off i didnt know the time. For the record , i have stopped wearing a watch a long time back. I supposed that it was 11:30.
When i got out on grand central and checked the clock it read 00:45.
The station was deserted except for a few homeless people and the ones who arrived with me in the train.
FEAR is the most general term and implies anxiety and usually loss of
courage. DREAD usually adds the idea of intense reluctance to face or
meet a person or situation and suggests aversion as well as anxiety.
TREPIDATION adds to DREAD the implications of timidity, trembling, and
hesitation.
-- Merriam Webster
What i felt on seeing the time was fear, that was when i lost courage. After that my mind didnt quite stay in my control. While getting out Grand Central i saw a sign which changed the fear to dread. The sign gave timings of the station. The station closed at 1:30. And as i walked and lost my way around NYC what i felt was trepidation. The roadsigns which read the street and avenue numbers were covered with snow and as i walked down four avenues i could still not read if i was
walking in the right direction or the wrong one. I needed to go to 7th Ave 34th Street. Thats Penn Station. And that was where my train was waiting for me, i hoped. I remembered something like 1:20 being the last train. Which left me with only 40 minutes to get there and which i was spending like an idiot getting lost in the frosted city, as the first sign i could read told me that i was now on third aveune. It seems i had walked quite a bit in the wrong direction. Why i didnt take a cab of which plenty were available i dont know. Its not that i didnt think of
taking one. I did. I just didnt take it. When you get afraid, you just do everything wrong. Walking around manhatten at 8 or even 11 is one thing. Walking around at 1 is something else. Suddenly everything becomes desolate and the seemingly shady characters hanging around the streets are the only people on the streets. I half walked half trot through those alleys jumping and sometime splashing into puddles of icy water and snow all the time trying to shut out the stories that one associates with the city and the cold numbness in my feet.
Penn Station was perhaps never a more welcome sight. But as i ran down the step i saw the NJ Transit sections curtained off and people leaving the station. The time was 1:15 and i raced to the screens announcing the schedule of trains. The relief on seeing the train at 1:41 palpable. Cause even if the train was late , i could spend the night in the station without a problem.
The train didnt leave till a long time later, but at that point i couldnt have cared less about delays. As i sat in the train i started my phone again, i got a call from my roommate. Apparently, the situation back was rather bad, with no busses running, the Late Night Shuttle closed and the sidewalks full of snow to dash any hopes of walking. Then he called up a dozen taxi numbers but none of them picked up. Finally after 15 minutes he finally got to one who was willing to operate a taxi. In spite of being a jerk myself, i seem to have been able to surround myself with friends who are real good. This is something that i myself would have been unable to do for someone else. But he was not i and i got the phone number of perhaps the only operating taxi at that time. As fate had it however another fortunate event awaited me. The Late Night Shuttle did start operating as i neared my station and in the end the last leg of the journey went off rather nicely.
I did finally reach home at 4 !!
A nice and interesting story, but when even after i reached home the trepidition had not left me. I attributed it to the nights adventure and went to sleep.
I believe i know why i am writing this mail. Some part is of course vanity. You need to tell a good nights adventures to someone. But that not the main reason. The main reason is this. After waking up today and even now in the evening i am for some reason feeling very uneasy , a melancholy whose source i cant make out. Writing this post, hopefully, gets me to the source hidden within.
It had been snowing hard for two days, and though i didnt know it at that time it was the most snowfall received by that region in a few years, when i started out on my journey from a small town called MiddleTown to go to New Jersey. To tell you the truth, i was rather against the idea of starting out that evening. And the snow was only half the reason. And since it was just half the reason i made doubly sure that i should go. That was the first mistake. I was taking a ride till the station with a friend. We did lose our way to the station but when you are in a car, you tend to feel safe. And ironically I felt rather afraid not when we lost the way but when we actually found the station. The station was closed and deserted except for a group of people chatting there. I had almost and hour before the train and since the station was closed i was stuck outside in the snow. The saving grace of course were the people and I took heart from that group thinking that they were also waiting for the same train. But i was quite wrong. They were waiting for a cab which came along, soon enough. That left me with another person who was waiting for his taxi to come along. He didnt seem quite as fortunate as the other people who had just left.
His cab didnt arrive almost till i left which was around an hour after. I am not one to strike up a conversation, but here i found myself talking to him. And it was from him that i realised that things could go really wrong. He had arrived on a train which was running 5 hours late, he said ! Here was when i made the first phone call to Mukta and asked her to get me info about the schedules. But she was out and would only reach office after 10 mins. I decided to wait till
she called back, but my patience soon ran out and after waiting for some time, i went into a frenzy calling up people to look this up. But as luck would have it, no one was at their phones. It was also at this point that i realised that i was low on battery. Conversation and song
are two things , i had realised a long time back, that easily and unfailingly lift the heart. But on that night, i didnt have either luxury. But everyone did call back and almost at the same time too. So for the first time i required the phone to actually have three levels of call waiting ... which apparently it does not support.
In any case i found that the train from Meriden to New Haven to NY was on time but that some trains from NY to NJ were cancelled. And this info i got at the moment when the train i thought was entering the station. This was not my train, but the next one which arrived barely
a minute later was. Here is where i made the second wrong decision. I should have headed back, and i desperately wanted to head back, but i ploughed on. The thought was the there was another train back in 40 minutes if things really were wrong in NY. But once on that train
there was no turning back. On the train i found i didnt have enough money for a ticket to NY so
bought one till New Haven. And my plans of withdrawin money from the ATM on the station and getting back on the train were very much shattered, since the train was running late, it just shortened the halt at New Haven and i saw it chugging out of the station just as i located
the ATM on the station. Here i felt totally mad at myself since the train back which was supposed to run 45 min later was scheduled to be 3 hours late. So i was stuck for a long time. But as luck had it there was a train which Mukta had missed when she looked up the schedule.
The next MTA train was to grand central and it left at 9:55 and thats what i took. And in the train i followed your example. I went to sleep , lying on the seat with my feet hanging down :-) It was as well that i did for the night was to be longer than i had anticipated. The plan
was to reach Grand Central at 11:30 , walk down to Penn Station before 12 and take that train and be home by 1:30. A decent time after all.
By this time i had pestered Sagar into looking up the train numbers on the NJ Transit website and matching them with the schedule numbers and getting to know exactly which trains had been cancelled. And the 12:00 train was not on that list. And after this i switched off my phone and went to sleep. So far so good.
I kept getting up intermittently at stations but I finally woke up when we were at Harlem. The station and the area outside it looked beautiful. The fresh snow bathing in neons was a sight i had not seen.
And it was beautiful. That and the lanes and the houses. Supposedly Harlem one of the worst areas in the country. I cant quite reconcile the image i saw there with whats supposed to be the truth. And i pushed myself out of sleep as we entered Grand Central. Since my cell phone was off i didnt know the time. For the record , i have stopped wearing a watch a long time back. I supposed that it was 11:30.
When i got out on grand central and checked the clock it read 00:45.
The station was deserted except for a few homeless people and the ones who arrived with me in the train.
FEAR is the most general term and implies anxiety and usually loss of
courage. DREAD usually adds the idea of intense reluctance to face or
meet a person or situation and suggests aversion as well as anxiety.
TREPIDATION adds to DREAD the implications of timidity, trembling, and
hesitation.
-- Merriam Webster
What i felt on seeing the time was fear, that was when i lost courage. After that my mind didnt quite stay in my control. While getting out Grand Central i saw a sign which changed the fear to dread. The sign gave timings of the station. The station closed at 1:30. And as i walked and lost my way around NYC what i felt was trepidation. The roadsigns which read the street and avenue numbers were covered with snow and as i walked down four avenues i could still not read if i was
walking in the right direction or the wrong one. I needed to go to 7th Ave 34th Street. Thats Penn Station. And that was where my train was waiting for me, i hoped. I remembered something like 1:20 being the last train. Which left me with only 40 minutes to get there and which i was spending like an idiot getting lost in the frosted city, as the first sign i could read told me that i was now on third aveune. It seems i had walked quite a bit in the wrong direction. Why i didnt take a cab of which plenty were available i dont know. Its not that i didnt think of
taking one. I did. I just didnt take it. When you get afraid, you just do everything wrong. Walking around manhatten at 8 or even 11 is one thing. Walking around at 1 is something else. Suddenly everything becomes desolate and the seemingly shady characters hanging around the streets are the only people on the streets. I half walked half trot through those alleys jumping and sometime splashing into puddles of icy water and snow all the time trying to shut out the stories that one associates with the city and the cold numbness in my feet.
Penn Station was perhaps never a more welcome sight. But as i ran down the step i saw the NJ Transit sections curtained off and people leaving the station. The time was 1:15 and i raced to the screens announcing the schedule of trains. The relief on seeing the train at 1:41 palpable. Cause even if the train was late , i could spend the night in the station without a problem.
The train didnt leave till a long time later, but at that point i couldnt have cared less about delays. As i sat in the train i started my phone again, i got a call from my roommate. Apparently, the situation back was rather bad, with no busses running, the Late Night Shuttle closed and the sidewalks full of snow to dash any hopes of walking. Then he called up a dozen taxi numbers but none of them picked up. Finally after 15 minutes he finally got to one who was willing to operate a taxi. In spite of being a jerk myself, i seem to have been able to surround myself with friends who are real good. This is something that i myself would have been unable to do for someone else. But he was not i and i got the phone number of perhaps the only operating taxi at that time. As fate had it however another fortunate event awaited me. The Late Night Shuttle did start operating as i neared my station and in the end the last leg of the journey went off rather nicely.
I did finally reach home at 4 !!
A nice and interesting story, but when even after i reached home the trepidition had not left me. I attributed it to the nights adventure and went to sleep.
I believe i know why i am writing this mail. Some part is of course vanity. You need to tell a good nights adventures to someone. But that not the main reason. The main reason is this. After waking up today and even now in the evening i am for some reason feeling very uneasy , a melancholy whose source i cant make out. Writing this post, hopefully, gets me to the source hidden within.
2 comments:
Hey nice description, perfect use of fear, dread and trepedition :P.
Keep writing :-)
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